Resume Mistakes Commonly Repeated – 3/18/2014

Healthcare professionals make resume mistakes that hamper their ability to connect with the employers

Whether you’re a practice manager, billing administrator, registered nurse, or physician assistant, you need a resume to find a job in today’s healthcare industry. This is especially true if you plan to utilize job boards when searching for your next position. While employers can use social media as a tool to get to know potential job applicants, most prefer job boards when they’re ready to hire. In fact, a recent survey by Job Board Doctor found that 68.4 percent of hiring managers and recruiters rely on job boards due to the higher quality of candidates found.

Unfortunately, many healthcare professionals make mistakes on their resumes that hamper their ability to connect with the employers who use these job boards. Some oversights will prevent managers from ever viewing your resume. Others will land it in the discard pile. If you want to maximize your employment chances, avoid these top five healthcare resume mistakes at all costs.

1. Paltry proofing

Submitting a resume with poor spelling, grammar, and punctuation may not mean you don’t know how to suture, draw blood, or run a medical office—but it could still turn off an employer. In fact, one survey on the topic found that more than 60 percent of hiring managers immediately discard resumes with typos. Frequent mistakes include neglecting punctuation entirely, misusing words such as “which” and “that” or “affect” and “effect,” and commonly misspelled words.

Fortunately, you don’t need a PhD in English Composition to produce a well-written resume. Editing and proofreading are key strategies, so recruit a few peers to review yours or hire a professional resume writer.

2. Believing one size fits all

Anyone who has ever purchased a “one size fits all” t-shirt knows that the phrase is anything but accurate—and it doesn’t work for resumes, either. More than 19 percent of employers consider submitting a generic resume to be the biggest mistake a job applicant can make.

Fortunately, crafting a resume for a specific position is not rocket science. It’s as simple as changing the language in your objective or career summary, rewording your experience descriptions, and switching up references to highlight the skills relevant to this particular job.

3. Ignoring keywords

Hiring has always been a time consuming business, but modern technology can make it easier. For this reason, many busy healthcare employers use applicant-tracking systems (ATS) to sort and rank resume submissions. These software programs basically work by scanning the data included in each resume before assigning a relevance score. Professionals with the most relevant resumes move to the front of the line.

Keywords are one thing ATS always look for, so include them throughout your resume. Your objective or professional summary, skill descriptions, and accomplishments are all perfect places to include keywords. Refer to the employer’s job description to identify some keywords for your resume.

For example, a medical office manager may write, “Busy practice seeks compassionate, organized, team player to fill challenging role as a physician assistant.” Keywords you would use should include “physician assistant,” “compassionate,” “organized,” “challenging,” and “team player.”

4. Telling rather than showing

Healthcare jobs are demanding, and employers look for candidates who can deliver results under those conditions. Use your resume to communicate your abilities with details and specifics. Numbers are important and more likely to attract favorable attention than a list of “responsible for” statements.

For example, a hospital admissions professional might write, “responsible for checking in patients.” A better description would be, “Facilitated a 50 percent improvement in check-in efficiency by reducing patient wait time to less than 10 minutes.”

5. Using complicated formatting

Leave the fancy fonts and graphics to professionals in creative fields. It won’t impress a healthcare hiring manager and may even confuse the ATS, resulting in a lower resume relevance score. In the study mentioned previously, 14.8 percent of employers responded that poor format is a big resume mistake.

For best results, whether you’re dealing with an ATS or submitting your resume directly to a hiring manager, keep your name and contact information at the top of the document. Avoid creative section headings, sticking instead to standards such as “summary,” “employment history,” and “education.” And if you’re going to include lists, use standard bullet points, as the ATS may not recognize others.

Avoid these top five mistakes in your resume and improve your chances of landing a new job. For more insight into the healthcare industry, job search tips, and thousands of postings from physician offices, hospitals, clinics, and other medical facilities across the nation, visit HEALTHeCAREERS Network.